Knowra Camille Paglia Camille Paglia Camille Paglia is an American literary critic and author whose work interprets art, sexuality, feminism, and popular culture through a combative, interdisciplinary lens.
Susan Sontag : Susan Sontag was an American essayist and critic who wrote on photography, illness, literature, and popular culture. Paglia’s criticism of Sontag became a prominent dispute over intellectual authority and feminism.
Sexual Personae : Sexual Personae is Paglia’s study of sexuality, art, literature, and Western culture, published in 1990. This book presents her central argument that artistic culture bears the force of sexual nature.
The Vamps and Tramps : Vamps and Tramps is Paglia’s 1994 collection of essays, interviews, and cultural criticism. The collection shows her method at work on contemporary debates and popular culture.
Second-wave feminism : Second-wave feminism was a movement, strongest from the 1960s through the 1980s, addressing legal, social, and cultural gender inequality. Paglia disputes strands of the movement that treat sexuality chiefly as a structure of male domination.
Sexual Personae: The Decline of Religion and the Rise of the Modern Artist : Sexual Personae: The Decline of Religion and the Rise of the Modern Artist is Paglia’s 1990 book on Western art and literature. Its publication brought her expansive, contentious theory of culture to a broad audience.
Kate Millett : Kate Millett was an American feminist writer whose book Sexual Politics examined power and gender in literature. Paglia challenged Millett’s account of sexuality and literary criticism.
The Birth of Tragedy : The Birth of Tragedy is Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1872 study of Greek tragedy and the Apollonian and Dionysian forces. Paglia adapts Nietzsche’s opposing forces into a framework for interpreting art and sexuality.
The Icy Sex of Madonna : “The Icy Sex of Madonna” is Paglia’s essay interpreting Madonna’s performance persona and cultural impact. This essay crystallizes her claim that pop culture can stage potent forms of female agency.
Radical feminism : Radical feminism analyzes patriarchy as a foundational system of power shaping social institutions and personal life. Her defense of erotic risk and sexual difference conflicts with some radical feminist accounts.
Free speech : Free speech is the principle that people should be able to express ideas without unjustified government restriction. Paglia’s public interventions repeatedly frame open debate as a defense against ideological conformity.
Show all 26